The storage, memory and processing properties of imaging pipelines in three dimensional (3D) printing are significant and grow exponentially with the number of dimensions used to encode inputs as well as intermediate spaces. In the case of colour, using 8 bits per red, green, blue (RGB) channel per voxel results in a sizeable memory footprint and processing such data also results in use of significant processing resources, all of which adds to the total cost of owning and operating systems such as 3D printing system and 3D computer aided design (CAD) systems. Furthermore, the challenge becomes more severe as the number of dimensions of input or intermediate data grows. For example, in the case of colour, three 8-bit values (for RGB) are typically used.